Press a button on the robot and it moves forward until it’s a certain distance from an object. It then takes a picture and sends it off to Google Cloud Vision along with a request to do face detection. The response that Google returns is in JSON format and, if it finds a face, includes the likelihood of the face being happy, sad, sorrowful or surprised. The robot parses that response and gives an appropriate canned speech using the text-to-speech software, eSpeak e.g. “You seem happy! Tell me why you are so happy!”.

[Dexter] has made the source code available on github. It’s written in python and is easy to read by anyone with even just a little programming experience. The video after the break gives a number of demonstrations, including some with non-human subjects.

On their webpage, [Dexter Industries] also gives a little further analysis. For example, one subject had facial hair which gave Google difficulty with interpreting the emotion. But after some trimming, interpretation improved. It did have difficulty with a baby though, possibly due to chubby cheeks.

After the last 3 attempts I did at getting something sensible from webpages showcasing Google AI I have little trust left in Google’s prowess at tackling that subject.
And I’m pretty happy about that, the last thing I want is capable AI from Google, since that will be used against everybody of course.